Seeking Ferret

I've written several times about how much I love Ann and Jeff Vandermeer's The Kosher Guide to Imaginary Animals. But also my wish that it were more detailed in its halachic analysis. I've said I wanted to write a commentary for years, but I hadn't gotten very far in that work beyond doing background Talmud and Torah study.

WOOF is the Worldcon APA (Amateur Press Association), a style of fanzine where writers writer whatever they want and print enough copies to distribute to all the other contributors. An editor then collates all the contributions and sends them out to everyone who participated. When I saw the announcement this year I decided to use it as motivation to really start the project. I wrote some analysis for all of the animals in the Imaginary Guide that begin with the letter A. Then I typeset the thing in LaTeX and submitted it for WOOF. My first ever fanzine contribution!

My goal is still to complete a commentary on the whole book, but that will take time and energy, better to do it in little chunks. I'm really pleased with what I do have, the writing feels tonally appropriate and gets at a whole array of different halachic concepts beyond what people usually talk about when they talk about these kinds of questions.

The official WOOF version will be up on the web at... some point? But you can read Sefer Chayot Agadiyot Volume 1 from this google drive link.

My outgoing travel was easier than I expected, though I busted my suitcase shlepping it down the stairs from the El, so that is annoying.

Thursday I picked up some groceries, then grabbed my badge and started a shift as an Ops runner, which meant wandering around the con being a Visible Person on Staff and answering questions about where things are and seeing if any problems were cropping up. It also meant being Mask Police, about which I have complicated feelings, but nearly everyone I talked to had no problem putting a mask on when asked politely.

After that, I had a quick lunch and then did my first panel, which was the one about lab safety. I think it went well, we had a good mix of panelists with lots of stories about safety incidents, and we had an audience full of even more good stories they were happy to share.

Then I did another Ops shift, then caught the tail end of a panel about how to balance how much science belongs in an SFF story. Then I took an ebike up to North Chicago and picked up dinner from the southernmost kosher restaurant in Chicago, then headed back down and ate and then slept.

Friday morning I had an early Ops shift. I caught some of the business meeting, then had my second panel, on fanfic skills not related to writing, which was a little uneven but I think on the whole successful. My co-panelists were Foz Meadows and Seanan McGuire, so honestly I didn't really need to do the heavy lifting.

Then I ran my 5E D&D game "Carting Wars", inspired by the delightfully terrible reality TV show Shipping Wars, which I had a lot of fun doing. There's probably another post brewing about the style of rpg oneshot that Carting Wars and Zoo Adventure comprise, which I would like to see more of. One of the players afterward told me that he hadn't expected it to be fun when I first laid out the premise, but by the end he was totally into it, and I think indeed there is something extremely counterintuitive about adventures where logistics are the plot hooks, but it makes for a very satisfying convention game IMO.

Afterward I took a break from the con for awhile, then rejoined things for Friday night services (Nusach Arisia) followed by a kiddush organized by one of the attendees. I stayed there for a few hours shmoozing about Judaism and fandom before dinner and sleep.

Saturday I didn't have any program or ops responsibilities so I actually could enjoy the con. I went to the business meeting in the morning, then in the afternoon I camped out in the panel rooms for a while, for panels on Libraries in SFF, Hopepunk, and Silkpunk. After grabbing a quick dinner I then left the con and went to the Chicago Jazz Festival, free concerts in Millennium Park. I saw Carmen Lundy and then the first part of the William Parker Quintet's show. I actually saw William Parker play the Stone fifteen or so years ago, it was cool to see him again in a wildly different venue. I preferred the show at the Stone, though.

I returned to the con for trivia, which was brutally difficult in a fun and satisfying way- I got 36/90 and that only put me about six or seven questions off from the winner. Afterward I popped up to the party floors for the first time and talked to some people, but I wasn't super into it so I went back down to go to sleep. But people were playing SET in the hallway so I asked if I could jump in and we played a bunch of SET then instead. Every time we exhausted the deck I was like "Okay, I should go to sleep" and they were like "One more game?" Eventually I did manage to sleep.

Sunday was off the charts busy. I went to program ops at nine to print out crosswords, then co-ran the crossword meetup at 10. It was smaller than I'd hoped but a lot of fun, I solved Matt Gaffney and most of the Sunday Times, and we all talked as we solved about favorite puzzles and styles of clues and weird word things. I introduced someone to the Eggcorn database!

I ran down to the Fanzine lounge because they were doing WOOF collation and I for the first time decided to submit a contribution. More about that in another post. Then I went to the FFA meetup for about fifteen minutes before I had to go get ready for my second rpg.

I ran a Dungeon World game with the setting inspired by Piranesi's Carceri D'invenzione- not particularly by Susannah Clarke's take on the Carceri, just the artwork itself. The players were all new to Dungeon World new to Carceri and I am not so experienced as a Dungeon World DM, but I think it was well-suited and we had a good time. I had to prompt some players a bit to get them used to the Dungeon World style of taking ownership of your characters' actions, but every player got to have moments of badass and moments of struggle to overcome, so I feel good about it.

After my game, I only had half an hour before my last panel of the con, on Jewish Spaces in SFF. It wasn't a huge crowd but I think it was the panel where the conversation had the best and most satisfying flow and I was really glad to have the panel. I got to rant about my pet peeves about the MCU, everyone else got to rant about their pet peeves, it was a good time.

Then I got confused and went to my Ops shift an hour early, which was probably a good thing for Ops because prep for the lines to go into the Hugo Awards was starting and they needed all the help they could get. I'd originally intended to just work the before the Hugos line, but after surviving the chaos of that line situation I got sucked in and ended up watching the Hugos from Ops HQ and helping to direct people out of the Hugos as well. Afterward I was worn out and didn't do any of the post-Hugos stuff. But being in Ops for the Hugos was a fascinating perspective on the event and it was really rewarding. I've volunteered for cons before but never in such a public-facing way. It felt good to help people and be able to visibly see that their con experience was better for my help.

Monday I packed up and had a last Ops shift. As the con wound down, I headed over to the hotel near Midway I'm staying at while I take care of some business in Chicago tomorrow. I'm reading a bit of the latest Dresden Files book, I'm more into this one than I've been to recent past ones.


Scenes from a Worldcon

-I overheard a young woman, late teens or early twenties, holding her badge streaming down with ribbons and telling her friend "I don't know why, but for some reason these ribbons really solidify my geek cred." It was such a small moment but it delighted me. I know I bang on this almost every time I write a Worldcon post, but fuck "the greying of fandom" nonsense, what is delightful about Worldcon is so many people at so many different points in their fannish journey and we're all coming together to encourage each other to be our most authentic geek self.

-Seanan McGuire tells us she's read an advance copy of Naomi Novik's The Golden Enclaves and it is so good that it made her want to send birds to peck Novik's liver.

-I got to kick GOH Steven Barnes out of a panel room! Because he was running the previous program item before my crossword meetup and he'd run long and I needed the room, but still, I got to kick Steven Barnes out of a panel room and nobody can take that away from me.

-I want to mention this, even though I'm not entirely sure what it means. But wearing a yarmulke in Chicago, I got a lot more comments than I'm used to just walking on the street, mostly creepy philosemitism but also some legitimately nasty language. I've been to Chicago before without experiencing that, and certainly it's not like I don't sometimes encounter anti-semitism in New Jersey, but... it felt like a lot and it made me feel a little nervous.

But on the other hand, being at the con was a generally satisfying and enjoyable experience Jewishly, between the panel and the various Shabbos activities, so that balanced things out for me.

fanworks is this weekend. I am very excited.

I will be modding two panels, "Ethical Norms in FanWorks Fandom" and "Does the Editor Make the Vidder?". The former is an idea I developed for DisCon that, um, was redeveloped after I stopped working on DisCon into something I was less happy with, so I'm excited to get a chance to do a panel closer to my original concept. The latter is something I tossed out as a suggestion at the last minute, I don't entirely know what I'm doing.

I will also be premiering 3 vids, two of which I'm extremely proud of and the other which I think is fun but unexceptional. And I'm so excited to see everyone else's premieres.



I've also received my preliminary schedule for Worldcon. It may change still but will hopefully be solid and announceable soon. I'm really excited about all of it, though I may have agreed to do too many things, between panels and rpgs. I've also started toying with seeing if I can put together something to include in this year's WOOF.

Busy weekend, but mostly good.

Saturday night my Mystery Hunt team did a trial run of a new software setup for solving the Hunt remotely, and it was so, so good to solve puzzles with those awesome people again. Our software setup is going to be a bit convoluted- because of feature compatibility with our custom puzzle tracker, we're using slack for text chat and discord for voice chat- but solving puzzles together with the discord voice chat was so much fun and it felt like a pretty satisfying percentage of the actual experience of solving a puzzle in person with Palindrome, though we'll see how that scales to the actual Hunt. Even though it's going to be frustrating to have to log off for Shabbos (normally when I'm on-site, I can still help with puzzles over Shabbos by looking over someone's shoulder or doing physical puzzly stuff like runarounds that doesn't involve writing), I'm really looking forward to Hunt now. We did some more puzzling Sunday night, not because we needed the testing, just because we wanted to keep working on puzzles together.

For new people, the MIT Mystery Hunt is a puzzle competition that's taken place at MIT over their winter break for the past forty years, whose objective is to solve puzzles revealing where a coin has been hidden somewhere on MIT's campus. It started as a challenging but relatively constrained set of puzzles, but over the past decades it has evolved into a massive undertaking drawing thousands of people to MIT to solve typically ~150 inventive and challenging puzzles over the course of a weekend. Puzzles span the gamut from crosswords to jigsaws and feature many unique puzzles types developed just to challenge the people who come to Mystery Hunt- "Chaos" puzzles involve teaching yourself the grammatical features of an invented language in order to find the hidden clues in a text in that language, "Duck Konundrum" puzzles involve following elaborate step-by-step, deliberately obfuscated instruction sets to find clues revealed by the instructions.

I've been competing at the Hunt on and off since 2006, and I felt a mixture of sadness and relief when the news came out this summer that Hunt would be going remote. Obviously it is not safe to host a massive puzzle competition right now, and I am very glad that the organizers are acting responsibly while still offering a puzzle competition. But I am going to miss the experience of being on campus for Hunt.





There was also a big staff meeting for Discon 3 on Sunday, discussing possible changes to the convention's timing. If you are considering going to Worldcon next year, either virtually or in person, please fill out this survey. They are trying to get as much input as possible before making a very difficult decision.

Survey on changing the date of Discon 3



And in and amongst all that, I worked a full day on Sunday, on a side project my boss is very hopefully may become my main project sometime next year.

I have fallen a few days behind on Daf Yomi as a result but will start catching up tonight, and writing up the dafs I have learned.

Worldcon Day 5

I got back in time for the panel on fanfic, which was about as good as could be expected given the constraints of the panel topic. Good, smart panelists talking about an only moderately interesting subject. There's so much more interesting that can be said about fanfic, but I am preaching to the choir here.


Afterward I spent the next four or hours in various virtual bars and parties, videochatting with other fans and pros. These have definitely been the best part of the con for me. I drank a lot of whiskey and I filled a bookmark folder with so many recommendations and interesting historical factoids and games and academic papers to read because everyone had such interesting things to say and everyone was coming from such a different perspective.

In spite of the drinking I woke up early, took a nice leisurely bike ride because it was too damned hot to push myself, watched some replays of earlier panels from the con including a great one featuring Cory Doctorow and Ada Palmer talking about the history of censorship, and then caught a couple of ConZealand Fringe panels, including "There Was Only One Panel", which was a really fun watch.

And that was the end of my Worldcon. It was not anything like being at a Worldcon in person, but it had some really good moments and I think on the whole I am glad I decided to participate, even though there are things I am also really frustrated and angry about.

Worldcon day 3

2022 Worldcon site selection was announced. It will be in Chicago, not in Jeddah. Chicon 7 was my first Worldcon and I hope to return to Chicon 8.

I went to a panel on D&D featuring Cat Rambo, Paul Weimer, and Sascha Stronach, which I enjoyed. They talked a lot about D&D's position within the overall ecosystem of rpgs and how you can take best advantage of the good parts of D&D and borrow from other systems to deal with its shortcomings, and it was helpful stuff to think about as someone who is pretty consciously running a D&D campaign that does not play to D&D's strengths.

That was the only panel I went to. I then had dinner and spent the rest of my evening on video chat, in the 'virtual bar' and in some of the convention bid parties. It was fun to talk to fans from all over the world and see how life is different for everyone, and also just listen to everyone being geeky together. morbane and cahn poppped into the bar for some time, it was good to talk to them a bit! I liked morbane's AO3 mug.

First day of Virtual Conzealand was fun!

I ate dinner while watching the Opening Ceremony, featuring nice pre-recorded videos from the various guests of honor.

The first panel I attended was on the possibilities of a Hugo for Best Video Game or Interactive Experience, about which I remain somewhat skeptical in spite of all my actual objections being well answered by the panelists. The award proposal is clearly well-thought out and well-designed and any obvious problems with an award like this have been thought out. And yet...

Then I hung out on discord in both chat and some casual video hangouts for a while. The discord has a virtual bar and virtual cafe with various 'tables' and a 'hallway' for popping into and video chatting. And I feel like much more than panels, that was the experience the people I talked to were searching for on the first day of Worldcon- how can I reproduce the most important part of Worldcon, seeing my friends from all over the world and meeting new people from all over the world and having conversations with them about fandom and life? I think we're still figuring it out, but I had some good conversation.

Then I went to a kaffeeklatsch with Gillian Polack, whose fiction I have not yet read. But I really liked her on a panel at Dublin Worldcon about Jewish fantasy, so I decided to join, and had a good time. She's a medievalist by training and talked a lot about wacky medieval history stuff, how to insult people in old French, and about her upcoming book pulling together medieval Jewish legend with portal fantasy and superhero mythos, which sounds awesome.

By this point it was mid-afternoon in New Zealand, but around midnight in my time zone. I popped into the DC 2021 zoom party for a few minutes and then went to sleep.

Delighted to see that Conzealand Fringe, a small unofficial group of panels organized to supplement Conzealand's official program on European time, includes this wonderfully trolly panel title:

"And There Was Only One Panel: The Joy of Fanfic, or Squeeing About Our Favorite Tropes"

Panel is to be Sunday 6PM British Standard Time.

I have submitted my site selection ballot for the 2022 Worldcon. It involved two different log-ins to different sites both run by Worldcon NZ, it involved filling out a PDF and typing in my Worldcon 2020 member ID from one site and my voting payment PIN from the other site, and then saving and emailing the PDF to another email address, but I have done it.

It really shouldn't be this complicated. I know people have talked some about amending the rules moving forward to make electronic ballots the primary option, and I support that, but I'm not convinced that the rules as they currently exist in the Worldcon constitution required quite the level of convolution we actually had. An https webform ballot integrated with payment processing seems like it could have met all the requirements in the constitution as long as paper ballots were still accepted as an alternative, for the small handful of stubborn people who would use it.

In any case, my concerns about Saudi Arabia as a host site are sufficient that it was important that I vote against it. I'm not sure we need another Chicago convention so soon, and the year after a DC convention, but Chicago is a fine city and I had a good time at Chicon 7.


Meanwhile, from the Worldcon Mark Protection Committee's official report in the Agenda for the 2020 Worldcon Business Meeting:

The headache caused by the nomination of Archive of Our Own (“AO3”) for Best Related Work only intensified after it won the award. We received many notices of items—e.g., “4.7 million fanfics are now Hugo winners”, "Everyone Who Contributed to Fanfiction Site “Archive of Our Own” Is Now a Hugo Award Winner”, and “The most talked-about win of the night was Best Related Work, which went to Archive of Our Own. Yes, all of it. So, if you’ve written fan-fic and posted it on AO3, you won a Hugo."—none of which is accurate or the intent of the award. At least one person tried to monetize having contributed to AO3 on a book cover. Our attempts to explicate that the award was for the creation of the website has, for the most part, fallen on deaf ears, and much of our year has been taken up with exerting exert legal pressure to have pins using our marks removed from sale on Etsy and Kickstarter. (Etsy at least has been responsive to our takedown requests in the past.)

I'm disappointed by this, I really had the impression that some people had gotten talked to about how their messaging about the AO3 Hugo was counterproductive and wrongheaded, but apparently they just decided that their whining fell on 'deaf ears' and waited to get in one last salvo.

My flight to Dublin is tomorrow! I am extremely excited. Unless there is plane fuckery; I already see thunderstorms projected for tomorrow evening.


There are way more things I want to do than time, but such is the way of Worldcon. I have a much shorter list of things that I absolutely must do, topped by running my fantasy zoo adventure as a Dungeon World module, running Benjamin Rosenbaum's fantasy shtetl rpg A Dream Apart, being on the panel on fanfic and community, attending a few other must-see panels, going to the Hugo Awards, doing some James Joyce tourism, and seeing some friends. Everything else is just a bonus on top of that.


Also gosh I just really need this vacation.